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Test Dept – Still Raging Against the Machine

When iconoclastic 'metal-bashing'
auteurs Test Dept reconvened in 2014 to commemorate the thirtieth
anniversary of the UK-wide Miners Strike as part of the Newcastle
upon Tyne based AV Festival of art, film and experimental sound and
music, it was an emotional experience. Rather than play live to
reclaim the band's provocative fusion of martial percussion and
constructivist inspired stage shows that recycled the scrap metal
ruins of industrial Britain into an impassioned and visceral form of
oppositional spectacle throughout the Thatcher years, Test Dept chose
to take audiences on a boat trip and give them a film show.

DS30 was a thirty-minute collage of
archive footage pulled together by Test Dept's Brett Turnbull that
charts the history of the mining industry and the communities that
worked in it, through to the bitter unrest during the strike and Test
Dept's own presence throughout it on their 1984 Fuel To Fight tour.
With the sturm und drang of Test Dept's own soundtrack intact,
musical input came too from moving footage of the South Wales
Striking Miners' Choir, with who Test Dept collaborated with on the
record, Shoulder to Shoulder, in 1984.

The film was screened along and about
the route of the Dunston Staiths, the monumental wooden structure
built along the River Tyne by North Eastern Railway Company in 1893
to transport coal from the Durham coalfields and loaded onto ships
waiting on the river which would transport their cargo across Britain
and the world. All of which, set against the backdrop of what is
believed to be the largest wooden structure in the world, made for
something far more than a mere pleasure cruise.

“People were crying,” says Angus
Farquhar, who co-founded Test Dept in South London in 1981. “There
were lots of people there from different generations, from miners'
families, some of whom had grown up with and lived through the
strike, and others who weren't even born then. It made for a very
emotional experience.”

The event was in part inspired by
avant-garde twentieth century Russian composer Arseny Avraamov, whose
1922 work, Symphony of Factory Sirens, utilised navy ship sirens and
the entire Soviet flotilla in the Caspian Sea to create a piece that
also included renditions of the Internationale and Marseillaise
performed by a massed band and choir.

A year on from the AV Festival, DS30
arrives in Glasgow on a tour of cinema-based screenings presented by
the AV Festival that follows a cross-country path through some of
Britain's former centres of industry, finishing up at Durham Miners'
Gala in July. That event will no doubt foster some kind of taking
stock regarding the Independent Police Complaints Commission's recent
decision to reject calls to investigate the conduct of South
Yorkshire Police – the same force, incidentally, responsible for
policing the Hillsborough football ground in 1989 where ninety-six
people died – during confrontations with miners throughout the
strike, particularly during the Battle of Orgreave.

In this way, DS30 is both a vital
document of its times and a call to arms to re-engage working class
people with a struggle presumed to have been written off by New
Labour managerialists in whatever guise they take.

“We've hooked up with the Justice For
Orgreave campaign,” Farquhar explains, “and with what's going on
regarding the Orgreave investigation now, it feels like things have
come right round again. In England we need to rediscover activism.
The Left needs to find itself. That's how you rediscover consensus
rather than just mourning the death of the Labour Party. Masses of
people who weren't even born at that time are hungry for change.”

The tour, led by Farquhar alongside
fellow Test Dept members Graham Cunnington and Paul Janrozy, also
marks the launch of Total State Machine, an epic 350 page book
containing a blow by blow pictorial and text-based archive of Test
Department alongside a series of new essays and reflections. These
come from members of the group as well as peers including Cabaret
Voltaire vocalist Stephen Mallinder, Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, Ivan
Novak of Laibach and former Kent miner Alan Sutcliffe among others.

“It's quite a personal thing,” says
Farquhar. “It's a full-on engagement with the past, and it's taken
three years to edit the book. Going back to what you were doing in
your twenties is something you don't do that often, so it's been
quite a powerful experience.

“I've talked a lot with Graham and
Paul about this. At the time we were doing Test Department, and when
the Miners' Strike was gong on, people could see that things were
wrong. They could see the police brutality, and that courts were
being set up to criminalise people, but there was no social media
then. The only thing we had was television and mainstream newspapers,
and we felt like we were helping to create this real centre of
resistance. By taking footage off the TV and footage that was given
to us, we could put on a soundtrack and share the real intensity of
the struggle.”

The history of Test Department is one
which chimed with the times they were forged in, even as they
continually and determinedly stood in opposition to the status quo.

“That first year, in 1981, we were in
this tiny basement with no electricity,” Farquhar recalls, “and
we'd play for five or six hours a day. It was almost Dickensian.
There was a rag and bone man who'd bring us prime pieces of metal
which he'd sell to us.

“At that time South London was in the
midst of this major transition, so many factories were closing, and
we'd spend hours in junk-yards, trying to figure out how we'd play
all these pieces of metal. Then gradually, from being ramshackle, we
became really disciplined, and these five scrawny kids, each with our
own baggage, had suddenly found something that was ours, and through
which we could say something.

“We ended up making political art
that was about more than singing protest songs. I think Billy Bragg's
brilliant and I think Paul Weller did some great songs at the time,
but they were very commercial. Punk had been rendered meaningless, so
what we were doing was completely rejecting that whole lineage of
rock n'roll. The instruments we were using were a military bugle,
bagpipes and a cello, so there was this neoclassical thing going on,
with early sampling from Shostakovitch, taking snippets from my
Scottish background and from Paul's Polish background in this
insanely utopian fashion.”

Farquhar admits, however, that Test
Dept “never quite knew who we were onstage. Were we these
propagandist, drone-like figures, making these incredibly ironic,
mock-heroic gestures, or were we just these young people who'd found
this thing. It was totally instinctive. We didn't make any
intellectual claims for what we were doing, and we only really came
of age during the Miners' Strike.”

The first Miners' Strike benefit show
Test Dept did was at the Albany Empire in Deptford, when any qualms
they might have had at how a bunch of hardened grafters might regard
a bunch of shaven-headed youths striking faux-heroic poses while
hammering with abandon at fire and steel were instantly dispelled by
some members of the audience.

“There were these two women who were
probably in their seventies,” Farquhar remembers, “and while we
were playing they practically had their heads in the speakers. We
asked them if they were alright, and they said it was fantastic,
because they were tone deaf and it was the first time they'd heard
anything for years.”

While Test Dept concerts themselves
became spectacles which eventually tapped into a burgeoning
underground club culture, alliances were being forged beyond the
Miners' Strike that saw the band – if that's what they were –
move into more formally theatrical terrain. Gododdin was a
collaboration with Welsh theatre company, Brith Gof, that reinvented
ancient legends in an epic water-soaked staging at Glasgow's Tramway
venue.

The Second Coming saw Farquhar and co
take over the St Rollox Locomotive Works in Glasgow as part of
Glasgow's City of Culture year in 1990. With some fifty performers
navigating an array of industrial detritus in a space the size of two
and a half football pitches, the show was a bold comment on how
Thatcher and her her progeny were intent on turning Britain into an
industrial theme-park. The industrial so-called urban regeneration
which has followed is testament to The Second Coming's dramatic
foresight, which can be seen in Brett Turnbull's film of the event,
which will screened alongside other Test Dept films at the DS30
event, including archive footage of the Fuel to Fight tour.

“Thatcher and that government had
this idea that you could take a rubber and wipe out these places and
these communities and replace them with enterprise zones,” Farquhar
observes with disdain. “When you drive into Glasgow now all you see
is these horrible regenerated business centres. You don't just erase
your history. When you erase that history, you wipe out all the
authenticity of the things around it and you replace it with
something false.”

In spirit, DS30, The Second Coming and
the other Test Dept films are akin to The Last of England, Derek
Jarman's equally fractured quasi-documentary 1987 state of the nation
impressionistic portrait of broken Britain. In terms of explorations
of working class communities, the work of Jeremy Deller too is some
kind of kindred. This is particularly the case with Acid Brass, in
which the Stockport-based Williams Fairey Brass band played
arrangements of classic Acid House and Techno anthems. Such a
disparate affinity can be heard too with the goose-bump-inducing
beauty of the Miners' Choir counterpointed by the assault-course
clatter of Test Dept in DS30.

It's probably no coincidence either
that Deller created a re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave, in
which survivors from the Miners' Strike from all sides worked with
re-enactment groups to commemorate one of the Strike's most combative
moments in an event filmed by Mike Figgis.

“We knew Derek Jarman,” says
Farquhar, “and one of the reasons I returned to Scotland was
because he said to never be scared to take a risk. There was a sense
then of making alternative networks, so all these things are part of
that and are connected. Like Derek Jarman and like Jeremy Deller, we
were trying to do powerful things that were opposed to the prevailing
orthodoxies, and we were trying to work collectively in a way that
has informed me to this day.”

In the final years of Test Dept,
Farquhar reconvened the Beltane Fire Festival in Edinburgh, a Pagan
spectacle which pitched drummers, body-painted dancers and an
ecstatic May Queen between the pillars on Calton Hill. While Beltane
continues to this day without Test Dept involvement, its inception
acted as a bridge of sorts to Farquhar's next venture with his NVA
Organisation. Set up in 1995, NVA (Nacionale Vitae Activa, a Latin
term meaning 'the right to influence public affairs')has moved the
spectacle out of the factory and into a largely outdoors-based
environment with a series of equally grand gestures which Test Dept
laid the groundwork for.

In Stormy Waters, the cranes on the
River Clyde danced. The Secret Sign took audiences on a gorge walk
along the Devil's Pulpit in Finnich Glen in Drymen near Loch Lomond.
Speed of Light fused public art with sport and performance as runners
wearing light suits activated intricate pathways around Arthur's Seat
in Edinburgh. And, in perhaps the most iconic reimagining of a
landscape, NVA are currently engaged in a long-term rebuilding of St
Peter's seminary, the long abandoned masterpiece of modernist
architecture situated in the woodlands of Cardross in Argyll and
Bute.

In the meantime, Farquhar and co's
revisitation of Test Dept, through both DS30 and Total State Machine,
is telling. As well as the Orgreave decision, Police Scotland's local
authority backed closure of Glasgow multiple arts space The Arches
similarly suggests that, in terms of its ill-informed fear-mongering
regarding underground activity, the state's attitude to club culture
has come regressively full circle. These pages have already observed
that such an action marks the dawn of a new culture war, which, in
the spirit of Test Dept, must be resisted at all costs.

“That's the power of coming together
and finding common cause,” Farquhar affirms. “The last time we
saw that was with the demonstrations against the Iraq war, when
people from all different backgrounds came together and were roundly
ignored. That was the day the Labour Party died. But there are good
things happening in Scotland right now, where the government aren't
ignoring things as much, although the lines were drawn when the
police were very surreptitiously armed. Things like that have to be
changed, and activism can do that, but you have to be careful not to
romanticise that as well.”

The destruction of the mines that led
to the 1984/85 strike may have been ideologically calculated, but
DS30 is both a grim and heroic reminder of a time before working
class communities were ripped apart and disassembled by an ideology
that still prevails in the recently elected Westminster government.

“Looking back at that time like this,
it's good to remember where you came from and how you can work
collectively with a common voice,” says Farquhar. “The history of
the 1980s as told on TV and elsewhere is all about Top of the Pops 2
and Duran Duran and horrible things like that, but Total State
Machine is really a history, or part of a history, of an independent
subculture, and I think the book will stand as a record of a history
that's never been told publicly before.”

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About Me

Coffee-Table Notes is the online archive of Neil Cooper. Neil is an arts writer and critic based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Neil currently writes for The Herald, Product, Scottish Art News, Bella Caledonia & The List. He has contributed chapters to The Suspect Culture Book (Oberon), Dear Green Sounds: Glasgow's Music Through Time and Buildings (Waverley) & Scotland 2021 (Eklesia), & co-edited a special Arts and Human Rights edition of the Journal of Arts & Communities (Intellect). Neil has written for A-N, The Quietus, Map. Line, The Wire, Plan B, The Arts Journal, The Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Scotsman, Sunday Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times (Scotland), Scottish Daily Mail, Edinburgh Evening News, Is This Music? & Time Out Edinburgh Guide. He has written essays for Suspect Culture theatre company, Alt. Gallery, Newcastle, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Berwick upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival & Ortonandon. Neil has appeared on radio and TV, has provided programme essays for John Good and Co, & has lectured in arts journalism at Napier University, Edinburgh.